The
Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines a
“part B institution” as: "...any historically black
college or university that was established prior to
1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education
of black Americans, and that is accredited by a
nationally recognized accrediting agency or association
determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a
reliable authority as to the quality of training offered
or is, according to such an agency or association,
making reasonable progress toward accreditation."
Part B of the 1965 Act provides for direct federal aid
to Part B institutions.—Wikipedia

Established
before 1964 with the Intention of Serving the Black
Community

The Black College
and University Act defined a historically Black college
and university (HBCU) as one that existed before 1964
with a historic and contemporary mission of educating
Blacks while being open to all. There are 103 HBCUs,
located mainly in the Southeastern United States, the
District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands.

HBCUs are
responsible for 22 percent of current bachelor’s degrees
granted to Blacks. Among Blacks, 40 percent of all
congressmen, 12.5 percent of CEOs, 40 percent of
engineers, 50 percent of professors at non-HBCUs, 50
percent of lawyers and 80 percent of judges are HBCU
graduates.

Racism: A
History, the 2007 BBC 3-part documentary explores
the impact of racism on a global scale. It was part of
the season of programs on the BBC marking the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British
Empire. It's divided into 3 parts.

Begins the series
by assessing the implications of the relationship
between Europe, Africa and the Americas in the 15th
century. It considers how racist ideas and practices
developed in key religious and secular institutions, and
how they showed up in writings by European philosophers
Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.

Examines the idea
of scientific racism, an ideology invented during the
19th century that drew on now discredited practices such
as phrenology and provided an ideological justification
for racism and slavery. The episode shows how these
theories ultimately led to eugenics and Nazi racial
policies of the master race.

Examines the impact
of racism in the 20th century. By 1900 European colonial
expansion had reached deep into the heart of Africa.
Under the rule of King Leopold II, the Belgian Congo was
turned into a vast rubber plantation. Men, women and
children who failed to gather their latex quotas would
have their limbs dismembered. The country became the
scene of one of the century's greatest racial genocides,
as an estimated 10 million Africans perished under
colonial rule.

* *
* * *

Update

Undergraduate Library to Undergo Major
Renovation and Library System ReceivesResearch Upgrades—Rachel Mann—7
August 2012—Over the next year, the
Undergraduate Library will undergo an
extensive makeover beginning this month.
When the library reopens in Fall 2013, it
will boast several upgrades, including a
café, state-of-the-art technology, and
research services, redesigned study and
collaboration spaces and increased
accessibility to book collections and
resources on and off campus.

“The
Undergraduate Library will undergo changes
that foster research and collaboration by
both students and faculty,” said Howard
Dodson, director of the Howard University
Library System and Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center.

Dodson
added, “The new design will include new
group study rooms, complete with smart
boards, white boards, as well as updated
Wi-Fi capabilities, and new computers to
name a few.”

During renovations,
Founders Library will become the provider for all
undergraduate and graduate library services. This is
part of a phased facility renewal initiative, a
multi-million dollar campus-wide renovation project that
began in 2011. Access to resources will also become more
user friendly with “Genius Bar” inspired service desks,
which will be installed throughout the library and
manned by librarians and staff to help visitors navigate
the systems and find answers to their research needs.

This semester, Howard students will immediately begin to
enjoy an improved ALADIN catalog system, which provides
access to resources at Howard and the eight-member
universities in the Washington Research Library
Consortium. This makes searching for, requesting and
retrieving library materials faster and easier. Howard
joined the Consortium in January 2012 and has since
increased its title offerings from 2.5 million to 11
million titles through the network.

In other words, if the African American
faculty enrollment at HBCUs is low, African
American students tend not to attend HBCU’s.
When this occurs, is an HBCU still a HBCU?
In other words, can you have a HBCU without
Black students and faculty? This is exactly
the issue that American Enterprise Institute
scholar Richard Vedder was raising in his
essay in the Chronicle of Higher Learning.
—Voxunion

Theodora Boyd was
born to James and Jeannette Boyd on June 6, 1906 in
Charleston. Her parents found out early on that their
daughter was an extremely gifted child. She was educated
in the public schools of Newton, Mass., and by 1923,
Theodora had been afforded an opportunity few
African-Americans would be able to partake in, and she
seized it with fervor and great determination. . . . .
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927,
Theodora began a teaching career that would span 50
years starting at
Clark College in Atlanta, Ga. Spending
two years there, she continued on at Radcliffe, earning
a Master's in 1930. She headed back out into the
teaching world, this time, to
Texas Teacher's College in
Tyler, Texas. . . . While the Great Depression had
crippled the nation, after one year in Texas, Theodora
continued to find work, and jumped at an opportunity to
teach physical education and French at
St. Augustine's
College in Raleigh, N.C.

Also during this time,
she sought her Doctorate at Radcliffe and
became head of the French department at St.
Augustine's. From 1931 to 1935, she spent
her summers attending Harvard University
summer school, but it was not until 1943
that she received her Ph.D, Phi Beta Kappa.
She also went on to earn a Certificate de La
Langue Française, de Civilization Française
from the Sorbonne (The University of Paris).
. . . Following her stint at St.
Augustine's, she taught at a number of
places, including,
Alabama State Teacher's
College,
Delaware State College, and
St.
Paul's College before her final stop,
Howard University.

It was there in 1961 Theodora taught French
and Humanities and by 1969, she became the
first female to serve as Chair of the
Department of Romance Languages at Howard. .
. .

She took on the
challenge of being the first woman to head up Howard's
Department of Romance Languages, succeeding
internationally renowned scholars like Dr.
Valaurez Spratlin and Dr.
Mercer Cook. Spratlin is noted for being the first
African-American to earn a doctorate in
Spanish as well as serving as Chair at
Howard from 1927-1961.

Cook, who
immediately preceded Theodora, was appointed ambassador
to the Republic of Niger by President Kennedy in 1961.
He held that post for three years. In 1970, Theodora
sent a letter to DeCosta-Willis, whose father
Dr. Frank DeCosta, Sr., she had known quite well. DeCosta-Willis
was teaching at Memphis State University in Memphis,
Tenn., at the time and was the first African-American to
teach there in 1967. She was there when Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968.

Theodora had contacted DeCosta-Willis to see if she
would be interested in joining her at Howard. She
accepted the offer and fondly remembered her time
there.. . . . When 68-year-old Theodora stepped down
from her role as Chair in 1974, she left the door wide
open for the 40-year-old DeCosta-Willis to follow her
lead. Theodora stayed on board as a part-time professor
until 1976.

Theodora never married or had any children, and by 1977,
her health had deteriorated. She moved back to her
family's home in South Carolina and was cared for by
relatives until she died on December 26.

HBCU Blues: America's: Historically
Black Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century—Della
Britton—29 August 2011—Perhaps even more damning than
the dismal graduation rate was the fact that the
national college graduation rate for black students
generally was four points higher than for students at
HBCUs, challenging the deeply held notion that HBCUs are
better suited to help black students finish school. Add
to this complaints shared by recent graduates of HBCUS
and HBCU faculty and staff about everything from
excessive teaching loads, to antiquated classrooms and
limited technology, and one can't help but ask the
question should the black community be addressing this
problem more aggressively?

The best of the HBCUs can compete
on every objective level. In 2011, Howard University,
which was once referred to as "The Black Harvard" and
which consistently ranked in the nation's top 100
universities, still managed a
respectable rank of #104 . Atlanta-based Spelman
College, meanwhile, topped all HBCU's
coming in at #59 among National Liberal Arts
Colleges according to U.S. News and World Report.
Morehouse, Tuskegee and Hampton also mustered
respectable rankings, but then the drop off from these
elite schools to the vast majority is startling. After
the top 12 most remained unranked or were listed as
"rank unpublished."—HuffingtonPost

The School of
Architecture and Planning at Morgan is not a department,
but a school with five departments—BS in
Architecture + Environmental Design, BS in Construction
Management, Master of Architecture, Master of City +
Regional Planning, Master of Landscape Architecture.
It’s growing and it has close to 400 students. It also
has three graduate programs. The only other
architecture program in the state is at College Park.
The school will move into its new building this coming
Fall. I seriously doubt if the current library has
either books and/or other resources to support the
programs offered in the school. It would make sense
probably to have a joint library between Architecture
and Engineering. Morgan's enrolment in Engineering is
very large. (23 April 2012)—School_of_Architecture_and_Planning

* *
* * *

Dr. Martin D. Jenkins,
PhD (September 4, 1904–1978) was an African
American educator, known for his pioneering
work in the field of education. He graduated
with a B.S. in Engineering in 1925,from
Howard University. Upon earning an
engineering degree from Howard, Jenkins
became a partner with his father in a Terre
Haute highway contracting business while
taking classes at State Normal. He secured
an A.B. degree in Education from
Indiana State in 1931 and, on September
7, 1927, wed Elizabeth Lacy.

After
teaching briefly at Virginia State College
(now
Virginia State University), Jenkins
began graduate work at
Northwestern University under Terre
Haute native and Indiana State alumnus, Paul
A. Witty. He earned a master’s in 1933 and a
doctorate in education in 1935.

His
dissertation was a socio-psychological study of
African-American children of superior intelligence.Before becoming President of
Morgan State College of Baltimore in
1948, Jenkins was registrar and professor of
education at North Carolina A&T (1935–1937);
dean of instruction at Cheyney State (Pa.)
Teachers College (now
Cheyney University) (1937–1938); and
professor of education,
Howard University (1938–1948).

A diplomate of the
American Board of Examiners in Clinical Psychology,
Martin published more than 80 scholarly articles and
monographs and lectured on topics related to his
expertise throughout the world. He also served on
several presidential commissions, councils and task
forces.

Maryland HBCUs Sue State For Racial Discrimination Over Funding—By Alexis Garrett Stodghill—16 May 2011—A civil rights group is suing Maryland’s Higher Education Commission for allegedly discriminating against the state’s four historically black colleges. The plaintiffs argue that Morgan State University, Coppin State University, Bowie State University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore have underdeveloped programs because black schools are funded in a manner that puts predominately white schools at a huge advantage. Administrators at Maryland HBCUs believe their institutions are deprived of the tools needed to create competitive curricula, while being forced to wait much longer to receive appropriated monies.

The results are outdated infrastructures and inferior
courses leading to low student retention. The Baltimore Sun reports that: “Parity among higher-education institutions has been an issue in the state and country for centuries, and the lawsuit recounts 200 years of [racist] history[.]” . . . No infusion of cash can compensate for the tremendous challenges HBCUs face on many fronts. These complex tests can only be addressed by the creativity of their leaders. Hopefully the situation of Maryland’s HBCUs will stimulate black college administrators nationwide to start an internal crusade to keep these organizations alive.—NewsOne

* *
* * *

Harry A. Cole, 2218 Madison Ave, Republican, Baltimore 4th; born in Washington, D. C., January 1, 1921. He attended the public schools of Baltimore, Morgan State College, graduating in 1943, and the University of Maryland Law School, graduating in 1949. Attorney. Member of the Maryland Bar. Formerly Justice of the Peace of Baltimore City and Assistant Attorney General of Maryland. From 1943 to 1946 he served as 1st Lieutenant, Quartermaster Corps. Secretary Monumental City Bar Association. Member, Y.M.C.A., Urban League, NAACP. First African American elected to the Senate in 1954.

He was admitted to the Maryland Bar in 1949. Associate Judge, Municipal Court of Baltimore City, 1967. Associate Judge, Supreme Bench of Baltimore City (now Circuit Court), 1967-77. Associate Judge, Maryland Court of Appeals, 1977-91.Cole married the former Doris Freeland in 1958; three daughters: Susan, Harriette and Stephanie. He died of pneumonia at Church Home, Baltimore, Maryland on February 14, 1999.Wikipedia

Judge Cole had an extensive collection of music that ranged from
Count Basie to
Frank Sinatra. He also loved to dance, said his wife of 41 years, the former Doris Freeland."He thought everyone ought to be able to dance," she said. "We would often dance the night away."In retirement, he used his legal skills as head of a commission that recommended revisions in the Baltimore City charter.—DailyPress

Victor Ukpolo, Ph.D., a native of
Nigeria, was officially appointed
chancellor of
Southern University at New Orleans
on January 7, 2006 by the Southern
University System’s Board of
Supervisors.

Dr. Victor Ukpolo is a
graduate of the
University of Maryland in College
Park, Md., and received master of arts
and doctorate of philosophy degrees from
The American University, Washington
D.C. A native of Nigeria, Ukpolo
started work in America as a dish washer
and taxi driver to put himself through
school.—BlackScholarsIndex

Thomas
originally enrolled at Howard University
in Washington, D.C. as a home economics
major in 1921, but after studying under
Prof. James V. Herring in his newly
established art department, she earned a
B. S. degree in Fine Arts in 1924. . . .
The Alma Thomas papers are owned
by the Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution. Literary rights
as possessed by the donor have been
dedicated to public use for research,
study, and scholarship.—AAA

The
concept of Southern University was put
forth by
P. B. S. Pinchback, T. T. Allain,
Erick J Gilmore and Henry Demas Anthony
Lawless as an institution "for the
education of persons of color" at the
1879 Louisiana State
Constitutional Convention. In April
1880, the Louisiana
General Assembly chartered Southern
University, originally located in
New Orleans. Southern opened its
doors on March 7, 1881 (1881-03-07) with
twelve students.

One of the original locations of the
early campus was the former Israel Sinai
Temple on Calliope Street, between
St. Charles and Camp streets in New
Orleans. Southern became a
land grant school in 1890, and an
Agricultural and
Mechanical department was
established.

The new president and first president of what is now
known as Southern University at
Baton Rouge was Dr. Joseph Samuel Clark. Clark, an
outstanding citizen in the Baton Rouge
African American community, presided over Baton
Rouge College and the Louisiana Colored Teachers
Association. The Louisiana Constitutional Convention of
1921 authorized the reorganization and expansion of
Southern University; and Legislative Act 100 of 1922
provided that the institution be reorganized under the
control of the State Board of Education. Clark presided
over Southern University during a transition period for
the institution. The student enrolment grew from
forty-seven students to 500 students and many of the
school's early buildings were built during this time.—Wikipedia

William
H. Watkins is subtle in his story of the
“white architects” who developed Black
education beginning in 1865, just at the end
of the Civil War. Watkins shocks you with
his “scientific racism” platform that he
explains “presented human difference as the
rational for inequality” and that it “can be
understood as an ideological and political
issue” (pg. 39). The reader senses a calm
attitude about the author as he speaks of
the philanthropists, beginning with John D.
Rockefeller, Sr, who was most concerned
about “shaping the new industrial social
order” (pg. 133) than he was for providing a
useful education. “The Rockefeller group
demonstrated how gift giving could shape
education and public policy” (pg. 134).

In their
support of Black education, by 1964, the General
Education Board (GEB) spent more than $3.2 million
dollars in gifts to support Black education. This
captivating book begins with a foreword written by Robin
D.G. Kelley who reflects that he learned one lesson from
Watkins, “If we are to create new models of pedagogy and
intellectual work and become architects of our own
education, then we cannot simply repair the structures
that have been passed down to us. We need to dismantle
the old architecture so that we might begin anew” (pg.
xiii). Why don’t the school reformers who mandate
educational laws experience such an awakening?—Review
by AC Snow

William Sanders Scarborough is a story of courage, dignity and
devotion to the life of the mind set against the larger
background of the Civil War, Emancipation,
Reconstruction, and Jim Crowism. He blazed his own
path in the academy becoming the first black member of
the
Modern Language Association which set up a prize in
his honor in 2001 and the third black member of the
American Philological Association. This
membership was life long, 44 years with over 20 papers
presented at APA meetings many of which he describes. He
was also member of the American Negro Academy and the
NAACP. As President of Wilberforce
University he directed the school through World War
I and handled the concomitant problems with
the segregated armed forces. He knew all the early
African Americans who had come out of West Point men
including
Flipper,
Young, and
Davis.—

Even after Chancellor Ellen
Hobbs Lyle's ruling in Chancery Court last Friday, the
fate of
Fisk University's Alfred Stieglitz Collection of
Modern American and European Art is no clearer than it
was before. But this latest round of legal squabbling
over the multimillion-dollar modern-art collection has
introduced a new wrinkle: the question of whether work
by white artists has any value beyond financial worth to
a historically black university— whose cultural mission,
through the years, has been to further black identity.

Last week was the latest
cliffhanger in a serialized saga. With Fisk petitioning
to sell a half-interest in the collection to an eager
buyer, the Crystal Bridges Museum-in-the-making in
neighboring Arkansas, Chancellor Lyle ruled that she
could not agree to the terms. At the same time, she told
Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper, who's leading the
state's legal challenge, that he has two options: put up
an alternative plan, or shut up and let the collection
go.

Lyle agreed that Fisk's
chronic shortfalls—regularly $2 million per year—make it
impractical for the school to display and maintain the
collection. Fisk spends an average of $131,000 annually
on the
Stieglitz Collection, in compliance with conditions
imposed by artist Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949. That was the
year she donated the art from the estate of her late
husband, the famed photographer and collector Alfred
Stieglitz.

Fisk's solution to its
financial woes, subject to the court's approval, is
articulated in a 2007 agreement between the university
and Crystal Bridges, founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice
Walton. The basic terms: For $30 million, Fisk would
sell a half-interest in the 101 works in the
Stieglitz Collection, valued at $74 million in 2007.
The collection would rotate between Fisk's campus and
the 120,000-square-foot Crystal Bridges facility,
currently under construction in Bentonville, Ark.

But Lyle ruled that certain
provisions in the agreement "override, thwart and dilute
the purpose for which Ms. O'Keeffe made the gift."
O'Keeffe's purpose, as established by the Tennessee
Court of Appeals during a previous legal skirmish in
2009, was "to enable the public—in Nashville and the
South—to have the opportunity to study the Collection in
order to promote the general study of art."

Therein lies the rub. The
deal's terms, Lyle ruled, "have the potential to divest
Fisk of more than a 50 percent ownership in the
Collection." For example, both institutions agree to
share the cost of the collection's care. If Fisk can't
pay and breaches the agreement, Crystal Bridges could
gain title to more or ultimately all of the collection.
And there goes O'Keeffe's purpose—the general study of
the collection in Nashville.—Nashville
Scene

Georgia O’Keeffe received
word in 1946 in New Mexico that her husband, Alfred
Stieglitz, had suffered a serious stroke in New York.
Catching the next airplane from Albuquerque, she was by
his side when he died on July 13. No one at Fisk
University in Nashville knew then that Stieglitz’s death
had put into motion a chain of events which would lead
to Fisk’s receiving, in 1949, an art collection
considered “the finest of its type anywhere in the
South.”

Stieglitz, one of the
greatest photographers in the history of the medium, is
credited with transforming photography from a method of
documentation into an art form. As a premier collector
and gallery owner of his time, Stieglitz encouraged and
acquired art work by many young American artists,
including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, and John Marin. He is also
credited with mounting the first exhibition of African
sculpture in the United States. O’Keeffe, generally
considered the most important female artist in 20th
century America (a description that would have irritated
her), had both a business and personal relationship with
the much older Stieglitz. They married in 1924, despite
the 23-year difference in their ages. . . .—Prodigy

Cooperative
HBCU
Archival Survey Project (CHASP), which is funded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities, is an on-site
survey of the HBCU archives. These materials are
generally unknown to researchers because they are not
listed in existing reference tools and databases. CHASP
is surveying ninety-seven
HBCU and is more than half
completed. When CHASP surveys an archive, the team
writes a description of each collection including title,
inclusive dates, size, and contents. These descriptions
are then sent to the NUCMC program for cataloging. In
addition, the CHASP descriptions will eventually be
published in a printed guide toHBCU archival and
manuscript collections.

When CHASP surveys
an archives, the team writes a description of each
collection including title, inclusive dates, size, and
contents. These descriptions are then sent to the
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)
program for cataloging in the RLG Union Catalog.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc. In addition, the
CHASP descriptions will eventually be published in a
printed guide to HBCU archival and manuscript
collections.—Buffalo Edu

* * *
* *

Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995), a
scholar-librarian and bibliographer was born
in Warrenton, Virginia in 1905, to her
father, Hayes Joseph Burnett, a physician,
and her mother, Bertha Ball Burnett, a
tennis champion. After receiving her A.B.,
from Howard University in 1928, she became
the first African American woman to complete
her graduate studies at Columbia University
receiving a Bachelors (1931) and a Masters
(1932) of Science in Library Science.

Dorothy Bennett joined the library staff at
Howard University in 1928, and on December
29, 1929 married James Amos Porter. In 1930
University President W. Mordecai Johnson
appointed her to organize and administer a
Library of Negro Life and History
incorporating the 3,000 titles presented in
1914 by Jesse Moorland.

The library opened in 1933 as the Moorland
Foundation. In 1946 Howard University purchased the
Arthur Spingarn Collection. By the time Porter retired
in 1973 the library, which was now called the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, had over 180,000 books, pamphlets,
manuscripts and other primary sources. Over 43 years,
Porter had successfully created a leading modern
research library that served an international community
of scholars. . . . —Black Past

* * *
* *

Historically Black Colleges and
Universities

And a Spotlight
on Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955

Historically Black
Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are colleges or
universities that were established before 1964 with the
intention of serving the African American community.
There are more than 100 historically black colleges in
the United States, located almost exclusively in the
southern and eastern states.

Southern University
is the largest HBCU and one of the most prestigious
universities. Located in Louisiana, Southern University
has campuses in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Shreveport,
the Southern University Law Center and the Southern
University Agricultural and Extension Center.

Southern University
has become the only HBCU system in the United States
with an enrollment of over 15,000 students. The System
encompasses five institutions offering two-year,
four-year, graduate, professional, and doctoral degrees.

Cheyney University in Cheney, Pennsylvania has
been known for graduating prominent alumni through its
education and journalism departments. Cheyney, founded
in 1837, is the oldest HBCU, established for the purpose
of educating youth of African descent.

Hampton University
was founded in 1868 and is located in Hampton, Virginia.
With an endowment of more than $185.8 million, Hampton
is one of the wealthiest HBCUs. The school confers
approximately 848 undergraduate degrees yearly and
consistently ranks in the top 10 in graduating African
Americans with degrees in biology, business
administration, communications, English, journalism,
pharmacy, nursing and psychology.

Howard
University, located in Washington,
D.C., is one of the most prominent historically Black
higher education institutions in the United States.
Howard University is a comprehensive, research-oriented,
private university providing an educational experience
of exceptional quality to students of high academic
potential. Particular emphasis is placed upon providing
educational opportunities to promising Black students.
Howard has produced more African American doctorate
degree holders than any other institution in the world.
Howard is the only HBCU to make the U.S. News and
World Report’s top 100 colleges and universities.

Florida A & M University was announced as the
best school for African Americans in 2006 by the Black
Enterprise magazine. Founded in 1887 as the State Normal
College for Colored Students, the venerable HBCU offers
62 bachelors degrees in 103 majors/tracks and 36
master’s degrees in 56 majors/tracks. Xavier University
of New Orleans, Louisiana is the top school in the
nation in the placement of Black students into medical
schools and has the largest number of Black
undergraduates receiving degrees in biology or life
sciences. Xavier also has the distinction of being the
only historically Black and Catholic university in the
Western Hemisphere.

North Carolina Central University (NCCU) is a
rapidly growing institution. It is the first liberal
arts college for African Americans in the country. Its
School of Law is ranked as one of America’s top law
schools in the nation by the Princeton Review. With a
student population of 9,000, NCCU is the ninth largest
HBCU. NCCU also has the highest HBCU graduation rate in
North Carolina. In 2005, NCCU ranked third in North
Carolina in admitting the most National Merit Scholars.

Xavier University of New Orleans,
Louisiana is the top school in the nation in the
placement of Black students into medical schools and has
the largest number of Black undergraduates receiving
degrees in biology or life sciences. Xavier also has the
distinction of being the only historically Black and
Catholic university in the Western Hemisphere. North
Carolina Central University (NCCU) is a rapidly growing
institution. It is the first liberal arts college for
African Americans in the country. Its School of Law is
ranked as one of America’s top law schools in the nation
by the Princeton Review. With a student. population of
9,000, NCCU is the ninth largest HBCU. NCCU also has the
highest HBCU graduation rate in North Carolina. In 2005,
NCCU ranked third in North Carolina in admitting the
most National Merit Scholars.—Wesleyan

* *
* * *

Mary McLeod Bethune
was born in 1875 to former slaves in Mayesville, South
Carolina. She devoted her life to ensuring the right to
education and freedom from discrimination for African
Americans. She believed that through education, Blacks
could begin to earn a living in a country that opposed
racial equality.

In 1904, Bethune
opened the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for
Negro Girls. Bethune never refused to educate a child
whose family could not afford tuition. There was
objection during Bethune’s time to the education of
Black children, but her zeal and dedication won over
skeptics of both races. Bethune also opened a high
school and a hospital for Blacks. In 1923, Bethune
oversaw the high school’s merger with the Cookman
Institute, thereby forming the HBCU Bethune-Cookman College. She helped integrate
the Red Cross and became president of the National
Association of Colored Women, formed the National
Council of Negro Women, and in 1940, Bethune served as
VP of the NAACP.—Wesleyan

Beginning in the 1830s, public and private
higher education institutions established to
serve African-Americans operated in
Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Border States,
and the states of the old Confederacy. Until
recently the vast majority of people of
African descent who received post-secondary
education in the United States did so in
historically black institutions. Spurred on
by financial and accreditation issues,
litigation to assure compliance with court
decisions, equal higher education
opportunity for all citizens, and the role
of race in admissions decisions, interest in
the role, accomplishments, and future of
Historically Black Colleges and Universities
has been renewed. This volume touches upon
these issues. Historically Black Colleges
and Universities (HBCUs) are a diverse group
of 105 institutions.

They vary in
size from several hundred students to over 10,000.
Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, 90 percent of
African-American postsecondary students were
enrolled in HBCUs. Currently the
105 HBCUs
account
for 3 percent of the nations educational
institutions, but they graduate about one-quarter of
African-Americans receiving college degrees. The
competition that HBCUs currently face in attracting
and educating African-American and other students
presents both challenges and opportunities. Despite
the fact that numerous studies have found that HBCUs
are more effective at retaining and graduating
African-American students than predominately white
colleges, HBCUs have serious detractors.

Perhaps because
of the increasing pressures on state governments to
assure that public HBCUs receive comparable funding
and provide programs that will attract a broader
student population, several public HBCUs no longer
serve primarily African-American students. There is
reason to believe, and it is the opinion of several
contributors to this book, that in the changing
higher education environment HBCUs will not survive,
particularly those that are financially weak. The
contributors to this volume provide cutting-edge
data as well as solid social analysis of this major
concern in black life as well as American higher
education as a whole.

To
their disadvantage, few Americans—and
few in higher education—know much about
the successes of historically Black
colleges and universities. How is it
that historically Black colleges
graduate so many low-income and
academically poorly prepared students?
How do they manage to do so well with
students "as they are", even when
adopting open admissions policies?

In this volume, contributors from a wide
spectrum of Black colleges offer
insights and examples of the policies
and practice—such as retention
strategies, co-curricular activities and
approaches to mentoring—which underpin
their disproportionate success with
populations that too often fail in other
institutions.

This book also challenges the
myth that these colleges are segregated institutions
and that teachers of color are essential to minority
student success. HBCUs employ large numbers of
non-Black faculty who demonstrate the ability to
facilitate the success of African American students.
This book offers valuable lessons for faculty,
faculty developers, student affairs personnel and
administrators in the wider higher education
community–lessons that are all the more urgent as
they face a growing racially diverse student
population. While, for HBCUs themselves, this book
reaffirms the importance of their mission today, it
also raises issues they must address to maintain the
edge they have achieved.

What
would it take? That was the question that
Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What
would it take to change the lives of poor
children—not one by one, through heroic
interventions and occasional miracles, but
in big numbers, and in a way that could be
replicated nationwide? The question led him
to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a
ninety-seven-block laboratory in central
Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes
controversial ideas about poverty in
America. His conclusion: if you want poor
kids to be able to compete with their
middle-class peers, you need to change
everything in their lives—their schools,
their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing
practices of their parents. Whatever It
Takes is a tour de force of reporting,
an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey
Canada but also of the parents and children
in Harlem who are struggling to better their
lives, often against great odds. Carefully
researched and deeply affecting, this is a
dispatch from inside the most daring and
potentially transformative social experiment
of our time.

Paul Tough is an editor at the New York Times
Magazine and one of America's foremost writers on
poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His
reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's
Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine
cover story. He lives with his wife in New York City.

In nine grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black former Harvard law professor who made headlines recently for his one-man protest against the school's hiring policies, hammers home his controversial theme that white racism is a permanent, indestructible component of our society. Bell's fantasies are often dire and apocalyptic: a new Atlantis rises from the ocean depths, sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white resistance to affirmative action softens following an explosion that kills Harvard's president and all of the school's black professors; intergalactic space invaders promise the U.S. President that they will clean up the environment and deliver tons of gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens take all African Americans back to their planet. Other pieces deal with black-white romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job discrimination.

Civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back in some of these ominous allegories, which speak from the depths of anger and despair. Bell now teaches at New York University Law School.—Publishers
Weekly

According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.

Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.

She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.

James Anderson critically reinterprets
the history of southern black education
from Reconstruction to the Great
Depression. By placing black schooling
within a political, cultural, and
economic context, he offers fresh
insights into black commitment to
education, the peculiar significance of
Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting
goals of various philanthropic groups,
among other matters. Initially,
ex-slaves attempted to create an
educational system that would support
and extend their emancipation, but their
children were pushed into a system of
industrial education that presupposed
black political and economic
subordination. This conception of
education and social order—supported by
northern industrial philanthropists,
some black educators, and most southern
school officials—conflicted with the
aspirations of ex-slaves and their
descendants, resulting at the turn of
the century in a bitter national debate
over the purposes of black education.
Because blacks lacked economic and
political power, white elites were able
to control the structure and content of
black elementary, secondary, normal, and
college education during the first third
of the twentieth century. Nonetheless,
blacks persisted in their struggle to
develop an educational system in
accordance with their own needs and
desires.